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[Guest Post] The first three seconds

(Salanna is a mage who runs in the same raid group as Spinks, for her sins. Her hobbies are drinking, setting things on fire, and reminding tanks of their own mortality.)

Hi. So, Spinks is away, and has rather unwisely turned her blog over to other people. People like me. A mage. Spinks situates herself in front of the boss, helmet on, shield up, perfectly placed and nailed there with tent pegs, whacking the boss with a fishing pole to show how hard she is. I’m just inside her line of sight, zapping four kinds of hell, with nothing between me and the world but a blue bar, the 130% aggro threshold, and my chef’s hat that I forgot to take off before entering the instance. Tanks taunt the boss, but mages taunt the tank.

Now, about that aggro threshold. Spinks and I, we have a funny relationship with that. This mage, see, has been working on improving my own DPS lately. A DPSer’s trade is never fully mastered, of course, but I’ve had my share of catching up to do. Now I’m not going to get stuck into the whys and hows here – there are plenty of resources for that – but I spent a good while following all the good advice, and it wasn’t clearly helping. Couldn’t work out what was wrong. I was beginning to think that I needed to hit the buttons harder.

Then I started paying attention to the very start of the fight. You know the bit. The tank has no rage yet, they’ve maybe landed a sunder, they’re moving around trying to position the boss so it doesn’t insta-kill the clothies – and those same clothies just let loose. The boss goes on a rampage, the raid leader emits an audible sigh on teamspeak, there are general exhortations in /raid to give the tanks time at the start without naming any names, and we all ress, rebuff and try again. All for the want of one second’s worth of patience from the DPS, on a fight where we’re nowhere near the enrage timer. Absurd, isn’t it?

Except. That’s the one moment in the fight where everything is aligned for those DPS. Particularly for a class like a mage where mastering your role is in large part about maximising the use of cooldowns, the start is the only place in the fight where all the cooldowns align. The macroed abilities (and mages do like to stack their macros), weapon procs, trinkets with mismatched internal cooldowns, more often than not a Bloodlust – this
is where they all stack, and stack multiplicably.

Which means that if you fluff that part of the fight, you’re not just missing out on a couple of seconds valuable damage time, but you are missing out on the highest potential damage per second in the entire fight. If you don’t keep up here, there is nowhere else in the fight that you can catch up. For a class like a mage with its many cooldowns, the difference does seem to be astonishing – in the right fight it can be the difference between being in
the top third and the bottom third of the meters.

I discovered that the rest of the effort I’d put in before was making a difference – but until I got the beginning of the fight just right, any improvement was getting lost in the noise. I had lost the race in the first ten seconds and could no longer make a sensible comparison.

Which gives me to wonder if this is an intentional design. Competition between DPS is a crucial part of keeping the overall DPS of a given raid group good and healthy. But when the difference to the outcome of the encounter is so small – there are very few fights in any given raid these days where a couple of seconds off the enrage timer is the difference between success and wipe – it seems absurd to put this level of tension between the DPS I reckon it is deliberate at least in principle, if perhaps not fully intended to have turned out the way it has. I can see that there is, and should be, a benefit for DPS and tanks who get to know each other well.

Asking the designers to remove that benefit is unlikely to be successful – and rightly so. But I suspect that how it has turned out in practice is, at least in part, a victim of the funny scaling of threat versus damage. Right now, this problem is bodged by non-tanks who help with threat by means of Tricks of the Trade and Misdirect, and nowhere is that help more important than the start of the fight. But this takes some responsibility for one of the most intricate parts of the fight away from the tank, leaving them with another five minutes of “three-stacks-taunt.”

That’s not a good thing. My raid’s tanks are all great, experts at what they do. I want them to be able to show that skill. I don’t want them to feel like they’re taking the place of an adequately buffed voidwalker. But I’m caught directly between showing proper respect for the tank, by giving them the little time they need, and showing respect for the raid as a whole, by learning to up my DPS.

So Cataclysm will cure all ills, right? Well, maybe. If the level of tension today really is a result of 64 ilevels of threat vs. damage, then it’ll benefit both from the gear reset and from the developers’ work to try to address that scaling in future. Both the risk of pulling aggro and the consequence of it is likely to be lower in a first tier Catclysm raid than in the end dungeon of Wrath; and DPS’ dependence on nailing the first few seconds of a fight will be lower thanks to the proportionately smaller procs and buffs at that tier, so the pressure to ride the edge will be eased. I reckon the measure of a successful outcome here will be if that tension between DPS and tanks can be ramped up a bit over the lifetime of the expansion, without having to resort to outside hackery again, and without sending us all back to Outland to farm the materials for Subtlety enchants for our cloaks.

4 thoughts on “[Guest Post] The first three seconds”

Very entertaining post! Can’t remember how many times I started dpsing (on my Boomkin) a raid with my fishing pole still equipped (or back in BC days my riding crop). I do not envy the developers job when it comes to threat balancing. I agree with you that the problem is “bodged” by misdirects and tricks of the trade. Then there is also the fact that you are able to go invisible to drop threat (or mirror image) and the fury warrior can only stop dps to allow the tank to catch up (ie., no threat dump.) That is if the warrior wasn’t one-shot already 8D Not every class has a threat dump or redirect (or even a threat mute like fade or feint.) Hopefully that is one of the fixes they put in. Although threat really hasn’t been an issue for most of Wrath- most bosses are tauntable these days.

I wonder- because I haven’t seen if the passive threat reductions have been removed from the new talent trees for Cataclysm- but if they are removed what will make up for those?

Mages don’t have that long a ramp up time I guess.
I’m a Moonkin, and as such I normally need a good 10 seconds before trinket procing and cooldown blowing is a good idea.

the Questions I have to ask are:
Have I got moonfire/Insect swarm up?
Do I have all my crit buffs stacked to max?
Can I stand still for the cooldowns duration?
Have I procced an Eclipse?

If all are yes, only then can I blow my cooldowns and start mega DPS (I’m currently packing a haste trinket to speed up my Starfire elipses)
So a Moonkin’s ramp up time gives the tank plenty of time to grab the boss.
The only time Moonkin’s cause tanks trouble is if the first wrath crits (about 1/3 chance of doing so) and if that crit procs Eclipse (again, about 1/3 of that 1/3) and I start pumping out 15-20k Starfire crits every 2 seconds for 10 seconds, just 3 seconds into the fight.

This also means that if I ever get bitten first on Lady Deathwhisper, we’re in for a panicked start, as it’s never planned for.

As a Fire mage, this is where I have the advantage over Arcane with threat management. I start with something in’obnoxious as Scorch then Living Bomb…then apply my big nukes after that. Therefore, threat generation is usually “one with the tank.” The longer the fight, the better it is for me…as Arcane tends to start fizziling out and OOM’d, while my damage continues ramp up incrementally whilts maintaining a healthy agro level without the OOM. Granted it’s not as spectacular as with my Arcane counterparts big numbered front end loads (with equally spectacular Mage eating threat), but I maintain repsectable, consistant and sometimes surprisingly high damage output minus the tank greif…

…but then again I am biast; Fire, along with being pink and pig’tailed, is the better Mage alternative. :)

Funny you should say that, in our guild we found that the opposite was true and fire mages were much worse for aggro than arcane ones, mainly because arcane is focused on haste (steady but fast damage), while the crit-based fire mages could have huge and unexpected damage spikes and then go splat.